The War Within pre-patch part 1.

The pre-patch for the next World of Warcraft expansion, The War Within (TWW) has started and it has been an interesting experience.

To start, the character screen has been changed significantly, with all characters showing up in one long list. Added to this is a section for four characters that when placed, show up around a campfire. You can arrange all your alts as you wish, but there is no sorting mechanism, so however you choose to arrange them, you need to do it manually.

There is a search function which is nice, as you can search for a class, but I hope Blizzard adds a sort by function as well. You can access the server list, but as far as I can tell, it only determines where new characters are placed.

A huge change is the new flying option. It can be found at the top of the screen where you see your mounts. Toggling it (5 second cast) switches your flying between the old system introduced in The Burning Crusade and the new dragon riding that was added in Dragonflight. All but one or two flying mounts are affected by this, allowing you to zoom along at incredible speeds on your favorite mounts. This flying style is unfortunately not chosen per individual mounts, but rather on the character itself. Oh, and it also affects the druid flying form, which is amazing.

The new warband bank, which will allow you to add items and some currencies into it so that any characters can withdraw them is implemented but it is currently disabled. Apparently there is a problem with it, and Blizzard is working to fix it.

What does work, however is the new transmog system. Through the years, many raid bosses have dropped tokens instead of gear. These tokens are grouped by classes and when a character of that class uses it, the token becomes a piece of armor. These tokens can now be mailed to any character you have on any server. Super useful! Armor that is specific to a single class is exempt from this and can only be learned if picked up by the correct class.

But it isn't all roses. As of now, currencies that are sent by mail can disappear, so wait before you do this. Likewise, many achievements have been reset, but Blizzard is aware and are investigating. I myself found that my progress for the Professor title which require 20 rare items found through archaeology has been reset to 1 from 18. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

The next step of the pre-patch, which is the fight against giant bosses that will let you amazing gear should launch this week. Overall this is really exciting, and I am looking forward to more fun in World of Warcraft.

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week!